Kernel Version 6.0 Exports

The large table on this page lists the 375 exports that were added to the Windows
kernel for version 6.0., i.e., for the original Windows Vista. These represent by
far the biggest change in the kernel’s exported functionality over the whole history
of Windows.

Documentation status is summarised by colour coding so that more detail can be
given as Remarks with less text. Functions that have their own non-trivial documentation
are shown with no background colour. If the function is documented as reserved or
obsolete, with or without a prototype, it is shaded red
or shaded grey, respectively. An undocumented function
that is at least declared in one or another header file from the Windows Driver
Kit (WDK) is shaded orange. If the only declaration
that Microsoft is known to have disclosed publicly is from the “minwin” directory
of the Enterprise WDK for Windows 10 version 1511, specifically, then the function
is highlighted orange. Functions that appear to be completely
undocumented are highlighted yellow. If a function
is documented now but is known not to have been documented in the first contemporaneous
Device Driver Kit (DDK), WDK or Installable File System (IFS) Kit, then it is
shaded yellow to retain some of its previous status
as undocumented.

Barely a sixth of these new exports for version 6.0 were documented for the contemporaneous
WDK, though many more have got documented since. Most are then said (correctly)
to be available starting with Windows Vista, but without even hinting whether this
availability was not generally disclosed until a later WDK. One function is documented
only as being reserved. Not quite a half of the new functions, and five exports
of data, are undocumented but with declarations in one or another of the WDK header
files. Declarations, both of these and the documented functions, are mostly for
Windows Vista and higher, but some have no version constraint at all and a few functions
are declared for much older versions. The other third of the new functions had neither
documentation nor declaration for nearly a decade. Then, apparently just for that
one edition of the Enterprise WDK, and very possibly only as an oversight, Microsoft
published declarations for very many of them!

Additionally, the KeIsExecutingDpc function, exported
from x86 builds in version 3.51 and higher, starts being exported from x64 builds
in version 6.0. But the two functions ExAllocateFromPagedLookasideList
and ExFreeToPagedLookasideList, first exported in
version 4.0 and retained for the first x64 builds, are dropped from x64 builds in
version 6.0.

This page was created on 20th April 2009 and was last modified
on 18th October 2018.